In the Oval Office, a Passage to Freedom

One night 150 years ago, in May 1861, three Virginia slaves crept away from their master under cover of darkness, stole a boat and escaped across the James River to a Union-held fortress. By the laws of both the United States and the new Confederacy, these men were not people but property: without rights, without citizenship, without even legal names.

This afternoon at the White House, the fugitives and their exploit were honored in a setting they could never have dreamt of: The Oval Office. There, President Obama signed an executive order declaring Fort Monroe, Va., the site of their escape, a national monument, placing it alongside such icons as the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty. I was present for the signing, and as I stood behind the president watching him set his pen to paper, I couldn’t help thinking that the three men — Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker and James Townsend — had just completed a journey that carried them across a far greater distance than those few miles across a river.

Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va.

True, they had drawn attention in the White House at least once before, long ago. Their flight to Fort Monroe just weeks into the Civil War forced President Lincoln to decide whether they should be granted asylum, thus undermining his inaugural pledge not to interfere with slavery anywhere it already existed, and his vow to prosecute the war as one to save the nation rather than emancipate bondsmen. But Lincoln’s ultimate decision to let the men remain safe within Union lines as so-called “contrabands” triggered a mass exodus of slaves — first dozens, then, hundreds, then thousands — that undermined the entire institution. (I have previously chronicled the contrabands’ story in greater depth in the Disunion series and in the New York Times Magazine.)

By the time Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation more than a year later, African-Americans’ liberation was, to some degree, a fait accompli. His private secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay later called the escape of Mallory, Baker and Townsend one of the pivotal moments of the entire Civil War.

For a century and a half, the story of the three men — and of the thousands of African Americans who followed in their footsteps — was largely forgotten as white Northerners and Southerners maintained a sort of tacit pact to minimize slavery’s role in the Civil War. Fort Monroe remained a United States military base, but no monument was erected to the contrabands. Instead, a “Jefferson Davis Memorial Park” was constructed to commemorate the Confederate president’s brief imprisonment there. Several years ago, when the fort was set for decommissioning under the Base Realignment and Closure Act of 2005, state and local officials seriously considered plans to fill most of the waterfront site with condominiums.

But today, for the first time during his presidency, Mr. Obama used his executive power to create a new national park. Fort Monroe National Monument, as it is called, will commemorate both the end of slavery and its beginning — since, by an eerie coincidence, the first slave ship to arrive in the 13 colonies landed at that spot in 1619. A grassroots effort by local and state officials and citizen activists overcame the reluctance of some critics to add a new unit to the underfinanced National Park Service at a moment of economic austerity.

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Fort Monroe, the president said as he prepared to sign the order, “was the site of the first slave ships to land in the New World. But then in the Civil War, almost 250 years later, Fort Monroe also became a refuge for slaves that were escaping from the South, and helped to create the environment in which Abraham Lincoln was able to sign that document up there.” Mr. Obama pointed to a framed, autographed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation hanging opposite his desk, not far from a portrait of Lincoln.

In a conversation after the ceremony, Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar called Fort Monroe “a crown jewel in the history of America’s march toward a more perfect Union.” He added, “I can’t think of a place that has more national historical significance than Fort Monroe.”

As I filed out of the Oval Office with the other guests — passing between the Lincoln portrait and the Emancipation Proclamation — I found myself thinking especially of Shepard Mallory, who survived many years after his escape from slavery, well into the 20th century. The 1920 Census recorded him, at the age of about 80, still living not far from the place of his enslavement and escape, working as a carpenter and school janitor.

In my mind’s eye, I saw the gray-haired ex-slave, leaning on his mop and bucket as schoolchildren passed him in the hall, oblivious to the history that this old man had made and witnessed. He seemed to be with us in the White House as well, bearing witness as an African-American president honored his long-forgotten passage to freedom.

Adam Goodheart is the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.